Autobiographical Writings

Ten years ago Anthony took part in a writing course when he wrote and recorded a brief but insightful autobiography.
This recording is published below:

Copyright Anthony de Jong Cleyndert 2012

An Introduction to Glass Works

By Anthony de Jong Cleyndert

Since my early works were conceived in a linear way and are concerned with
landscape and architectural space, I have been looking for a definition of
painting on glass, and I find Martin Heidegger’s theories from Greek
philosophy relevant to me. The Greeks talked of places cleared or freed for
settlement and lodging; a space is therefore something which has been made
room for, something that is “cleared and freed”, namely within
a boundary. This boundary is not something at which space stops, but something
from which space begins. The horizon is the boundary creating a space that
is let into light.

When I began making glass I had no knowledge of the process. In an attempt
to make a convincing image it seemed to me that I had to relearn picture making
in a different medium. Looking back I realised that I had worked very loosely
as a painter, and it became obvious on starting glass work that the image had
to be made step by step. Whereas painting for me had become a familiar and
intuitive process, the method of glass making was one step removed involving
technique. The glass began to succeed where the intuition and the technique
were working together.

This first series of works are based on the place in Norfolk where I
grew up. This way of building an image began to absorb my interest, and I began
to be able to concentrate on pursuing a concept of space in the image, using
basic stencilling techniques.

I started in the earlier glass, by making a drawing onto the screen to
establish the image. Looking back, this drawing was strongly in perspective.
In subsequent stages of the glass I used acid etching.

The images I have made have been drawn from familiar architectural and
landscape views, views from my window, and walks I take where I won’t
be disturbed. I was drawn to glass making, as the technique offered a very
immediate method of using colour. Just as I had been able to make a painting
swiftly, in glass making the image could be made quickly too.

I felt I must always hold true to what the original view gave me, and
the drawing I made of that view. This has come to interest me, as although
I felt I could be freely inventive with that original drawing on the screen,
a change of emphasis in producing a glass began to develop.

Whereas, as I have shown a coloured perspective was all that I could
produce early on, I began to develop the colour in a way that the image was
not so recognisable using acid etching. Technically, the colour was not confined
to specific areas in the drawing, but existed independently. Colour developed
in this way from the naturalistic to abstract.

In some works colour began to breakdown the confines of a drawing. Where
a plane could have been denoted by one colour, another colour was etched. Colour
existed in its own right, and though true to the original view, the image was
semi abstract. In later glass the linear perspective is lost, and colour is
directly etched onto the glass in the early stages, and therefore more abstract
shapes arise. The glass making becomes more intuitive, though no less true
to the experience of drawing from the view.

Many issues in art I have found to be taken for granted, and I feel basic
problems in making an image are left undiscussed. Since making architectural
drawings as a child, I never questioned the use of perspective that had come
naturally to me. I used perspective to make the drawing real, and years later
I questioned this reality when I needed to express a deeper consciousness of
life. Living in Florence for a year, the element of the spiritual in Art came
upon me with a great impact. Some time later I felt an affinity with Blake’s
views of the fallen man; the subdivision of the original innocent man into
the individual elements that make up his being. These ideas echoed in me the
striving for understanding and harmony, to overcome the conflict and incompleteness
of our looking.

In simple language, Frank Stella in his book “Working Space”, discusses
a Vermeer painting, suggesting Vermeer was the only one “to realise that
painting has to come to terms with what it cannot see, even though it fears
this confrontation. Our first reaction after pulling back the curtain at the
edge of the painting is one of delight. We feel first the miraculously lit,
encapsulated space will endure, that it will drift along with us, accompanying
our collective spectating consciousness, until we cease to exist. We have the
sense of invading a private moment as we enter Vermeer‘s painting, but
soon the sense of penetrating detail, the sense of a tapestry unravelling in
our hands, suggests that this private moment is merely everyone’s accommodation
to passing time”.

The most significant development in my work has been the development
from figurative to abstract: a development from naturalistic form and colour
to abstract shape and colour. Leonardo da Vinci writes about “making
the perspective of the colours, so that it is not at variance with the size
of any object, that is, that the colours lose part of their nature, in proportion
as the bodies of different distances suffer loss of their natural quantity”.
It is this scientific language of space and colour which I have sought to understand
and thereby free myself of. In the earlier prints of the place where I grew
up in Norfolk, perspective is used most strongly. Perhaps these works are most
strongly recognised as “views”, and have a sort of completeness.
They are unsatisfying to me for two reasons. Perspective is a universal language,
and in that sense is an impersonal language. In these early works the division
of space is depicted by foreground, middle ground (the subject) and background.
In the series of glass I made of Widford, this division begins to disintegrate.
Flat areas and shapes (or planes) of colours are screened onto the glass. The
image becomes less easy to read, and space in terms of perspective begins to
change. What I have said about time (in relation to perspective and depicting
appearances rather than deeper reality) begins to change too. Areas of colour
interact with each other in an abstract way.

Later, the original perspective format has dramatically altered. Perhaps
it is an artistic solution, but there is no obvious foreground, middle ground,
and background. The movement and sense of exploring a place becomes translated
in the glass, by the movement and interaction of the colours themselves. The
glass might have more relation to harmony in music, rather than the original
subject, though I have kept to the essence of the drawing I made.

In an earlier image transcribed from a painting by Beato Angelico, the
subject of the glass, a harbour scene, has been translated in the screen print
as flat forms in isolation, with no intentional spatial structure, and I feel
his work paved the way for a transition from perspective to abstract space.
The issue of space becomes an issue of subject too, since in the whole development
of my glass, the subject has always been very important, and all I have produced
is from the subject, in terms of light and colour. Although no formal analysis
of colour is made here, Heidegger‘s theories of drawing are true to my
own intuition. I feel the play of light relates directly to the colour, and
light becomes the solid and the void; the surface and the atmosphere.

In 2005 Anthony met the lead artist David Melia and collaborated on the
Harlow window and several other commissions including a memorial panel to his
father. David also collaborated on a series of exhibition panels. Leading is
really the skeleton of stained glass and David understood the lead as form
in the glass.

These images reinforce my belief of the experience of looking. Mood plays
an important part; the form is realised in the creating of the glass. Space
is pursued and experienced a kind of catharsis, freeing myself of the confines
of perspective drawing.